Stir The Pot: Paidamoyo Muzulu ZIMBABWE sets its own standards. It is not bound by international norms. This is the age of making our own reality. In the last decade, Zimbabwe has created new standards for what unemployment is. Through the dubious formula, Zimbabwe today is among the top countries not fighting unemployment. Our unemployment level is below 10%, according to the national statistical agency. The irony of the low unemployment rate is that the government is busy saying it wants to create jobs, secure investment, build new industries. The question is: Who are the jobs being created for? It becomes clear that Zimbabwe has masked its unemployment figures in order to hide the rot, a comatose economy amid the plunder by political elites and their hangers-on. The government says everyone who is economically active is employed. This includes vendors, those tending their fields and everyone else who in the preceding three months had some casual employment — they are all employed. This thinking is further projected in the hare-brained idea that Zimbabwe would be an upper-middle class economy by 2030. It is an administration hell bent on ticking the boxes — having quantitative growth at the expense of the living standards of its people. It is very easy to reach upper middle-class status based on per capita income — some obscure formula that says the total wealth of the nation divided by the population. Unfortunately, in reality this could be wealth belonging to 10 conglomerates. The administration is scared to use the other qualitative measures on measuring upper-middle income status such as how many people have access to toilets, potable water, how many do not live in abject poverty, access to safe and affordable energy, how many can access basic health and education services or even life expectancy? The reality is the administration is aware it cannot supply adequate potable water to its urban citizens in the next decade or safe and affordable energy. It is aware it cannot supply primary health care to its citizens nor can it provide basic education. This administration knows for the next decade it cannot make the working class have a living wage. And its solution; a neoliberal calculation of national wealth driven by feudal capitalists. It is within the same spirit of disguising grim figures behind some contrived formula that Primary and Secondary Education minister Cain Mathema this week announced a proposition to look into Grade Seven results classification. Mathema told the State-controlled media that the government was ready to redefine what a zero-pass rate means. This is a decision that follows the poor 2020 Grade Seven results, a set of results that is set to stay with us until a serious restructuring of the education curricular and motivation of teachers is put in place. The Zimbabwe School Examinations Council (Zimsec) Grade Seven pass rate for 2020 dropped from 46,9% in 2019 to 37,1% last year owing to a number of challenges such as the outbreak of COVID-19 and teachers strike. A whopping 88 schools re